giving back and helping everyone w/my dear friend sydnee sampson

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auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. So that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at t s and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. I hope you enjoy the episode. Let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Let's get it. Good morning. Happy Friday, everybody. I'm coming in from the West Coast, deep in the Bay Area.

Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. Anybody from East Oakland on a call today? No? Cricket? OK. But hi, everyone. I'm Sydney Sampson. I'm from East Oakland, California. I'm a current software engineer at Accenture, and I am also an apparel designer at my own company called ShipTek Prints. It's Dr. in California, and I'm busy. I'm busy all day, every day. Yeah, if you do not follow Sydney on Twitter, I highly recommend it. I told her, I told Sydney before I went live that she's an inspiration to me. So, but all right, so I wanna dive in to kind of the topic today is giving back. Right, talk to me about your journey and why you are so passionate about giving back.

So for me, as I mentioned before, I'm from East Oakland, California. And right now, my purpose for trying so hard to give back to my community is because I was once, you know, one of those kids or one of those individuals, that was on the streets and didn't really know what I wanted to do in my life, didn't know what I wanted to do in my career. Nobody in my family has a career at all, right? Like everybody is still working labor jobs or you just been working in the field. So for me, when I was a young girl at like 16, I realized the issue, right?

Like I realized the cycle that kept on in my family and my hood, all of my friends, You know, like if they did go to college, they'll go to college and come home. And there's nothing after that, right? So I wanted to change the narrative. I wanted to be different. I wanted to set the tone for everybody else that came behind me. So as a 16 year old girl in San Francisco, I left my mother's house. I started working. I started cleaning houses. I started just doing entrepreneur work, which right now I'm 25. So I just turned 25 in December. So it's been almost, I wanna say almost about like 10 years since I went outside, you know, trying to develop my personal brand and figure out what I wanted to do, right?

So coming like I said from a broken home that I wanted to build, you know, I finally got a house now, I got a nice office. Like it's just so new means that matter that I couldn't see back then. And now that I have it, I wanna go back and get all of the other kids from East Oakland to what I got now. I love that. If that doesn't fire you up this Friday morning, you need to go drink some coffee or something because I love that. So is there a moment, I'm always fascinated, right? Was there a moment that you were like, this has got to change, right?

Because I mean, we always talk about growing up and doing something different, right? not being a victim, not continually perpetuating the cycle, right? Is there a moment or is it just kind of like your entire upbringing of doing something different? But was there anything that like, cause I'm always fasting when people kind of grow up in a specific setting and buck the trend, was there a specific thing that that caused you to do that? Yeah. I think it was like my senior year in high school, as I mentioned, I left my mom's house to 16. When I was 16, I think I was a sophomore in high school and I just started going to school in San Francisco.

Things were hard. I wasn't going to school. I wasn't going to school. I was mostly just working. I would get up at four in the morning, go clean toilets, go drop off, drop by the school. Not even going and really sit down and really do work. I would drop by the school maybe for about two to three, four hours at most. From there, I would leave, I would go to the gap, you know, and work at the gap, fold and fold. And then like once, even I started, once those four hours shortened, right, ended up picking up another job in between there. So at one point, while I was 17, there was just no school, like, there was just no school.

And I was just looking at myself, like, is this really what you want? Is this really, you know, if you don't get an education, like, you know, you're like, like, you know, where are you going to go? Right? Like, what do you want to do once you do turn 18 and you really do like you're already taking care of yourself. So like, what's the odds? Right? If you literally just stay out here and you don't do nothing productive and you don't go nowhere. So I had a coming to Jesus moment, right? I had to talk to myself and literally like lay out my pros and cons and look 10 years.

I'm not even 10 years now from that from that day, right? Like that was when I was 17, what that was about eight, seven years ago or so, something like that. But yeah, like I had to just tell myself like, you know, where do you want to go? What do you want to do? Like, and if somebody gave you a million dollars right now, like what would you do with it? And right then and there, I didn't know. Besides, you know, go hang out with my friends, you know, go out and have some fun. And that's when I knew that something that had to kick in.

And I ended up unroading. I'm like, OK, I'm not going to school. Why am I here? So I ended up dropping out of my regular high school when it's signed up to an adult school. And I was like, OK, I'm taking my life seriously. I'm going here. I'm going to do these packets. Once I finish with these packets, I'm figuring out where I'm going next. If I'm going to a college, if I'm going to a barber school, if I'm going to a coding boot camp, whatever it may be. And it ended up being right after I walked across the stage. I think this was like January of 2016, I walked across the stage.

And from there, I enrolled into Barver College the next day. I'm not a barver right now, but it was just something, you know, that gave me like, I was in control of my life and I would be the one that make the decisions of where I wanted to go next. And it wouldn't be my family, it wouldn't be the police, it wouldn't be my friends, it wouldn't be neighborhood, it was none of that. It was all my fault. What's your, and that's so amazing, what's your biggest advice, right, for people, for people who are struggling, and I'm going to ask this question, I'm going to go start the TV again for my daughter.

So I'm going to ask this question, I'm going to exit, you answer it and I'll be right back. What's your biggest piece of advice for people who feel like they are stuck in their lives and I'll be right back? My biggest advice for folks that feel like they are stuck in their lives is to if you see my background right here this is my office and I have this up here behind my head where every day when I come in my office I look at this it's a piece of motivation and it's also something like everything every time that I'm feeling down these are things that I think about right believing yourself not just believing yourself but aim for the stars right?

Don't give up, you know, and constantly keep telling yourself that you got this. Like, those four things are the things that I keep on my radar from the day days. You see, like I said, it's up in my office and it's been there maybe for about the last six months. And some days, when I'm not feeling it, I'm ready to give up. Like, you know, I'm going, I'm stuck on a ticket at work that I haven't been able to get through for a couple days. Like, I love me just come sitting here, lock my office door, turn off the lights, you know, and sometimes I just read this post back here like over and over again, right?

Because you're your biggest critic, you know? And it's like, if you don't push yourself, if you don't set yourself up for success, if you don't tell yourself you can do it, who else in the hell in the world is gonna do it if you don't do it for yourself? That's true, so true, I love that. What, so talk to me about what you're doing for the Tech Community in Oakland. I think your mission's incredible. So let's start there, and then I want to go into kind of your journey getting into software development too. So let's start first off, what are you doing in your neighborhood to increase awareness with all this?

So we're the start. So. Yeah, I know. I'm a member of the team. As I mentioned, I'm a apparel designer at my own company called Ship Tech Prince. I started that business right at the beginning of the pandemic and the purpose of me started it. When I first started it, it was just to make money, right? I was like, okay, let me clean up some t-shirts. Let me just start sharing my designer and my artwork and just get people to buy it. And then a month into the pandemic, I had so many friends, so many family members and young kids who were coming to me, Hey, I just lost my job.

I need a way to make money. I got eviction notice on my door. I don't know what to do. I don't know how I'm going to feed my kids. And I'm like, I got you. I didn't have them, though. I didn't have a plan, right? And at this point, I'm selling t-shirts. I'm going to pop up shop. I'm selling oils and creams and all of that. And from there, I said, you know what? Let me go ahead and re-scope my entire business and let me tailor all of my services to the people. So in a couple weeks, I actually filled up my bedroom. I had people lined up in my living room, lined up up my stairs in my bedroom where I was having people come into my house where I would build them a website, the e-commerce site for their business.

I would help them build out an entire business plan, find them vendors, help them create an entire e-commerce store that's scalable. And a lot of my clients are still today, still running their business. and it makes me so happy. And that's what I did during the pandemic. So like I'm like, okay, I tried this out, what adults it's working. Right. Now let me look to the kids, right? So I have all of these cousins and, you know, my younger siblings that are, they were out of school when the pandemic happened. So everybody is at my house and everybody is listening to me like Sydney, like you're smart, you're the nerd, like help us make some money.

So I'm like, okay, say less. So I got the adults upstairs working on websites, printing t-shirts in my bedroom, I bought all this equipment. I'm trying, I'm looking at my phone and see if I can find a picture. So I can share it with you guys when I just had all of my equipment going around my room. I started with the kids down in the living room, teaching them the exact same things that the adults were doing upstairs, but for free. Now, to me, why I did this for free was like, because okay, not only are these my younger siblings that are not in school, but they can learn something from me that they can go and either teach their friends or they can just go and create companies.

You get what I'm saying? They can be long lasting, very profitable where they never actually got to go work a labor job nine to five. So from there, that was my testing period in my house. Within two months, I got my first retail store two months from my bedroom. And once I got that, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go crazy. I'm gonna be driving to Oakland every day. I'm doing pop-up shops. I'm finna, you know, just start selling things to make her so I can be able to give these students all. Now I have students now, right? I have all these kids that are looking up to me and they're looking like, how are you making money?

My mom lost her job. I've never seen anybody make home from their living room couch. I've never seen anybody literally close their eyes, speak of a business idea, create a business plan, create a logo, execute and be outside already selling their product. Like nobody around me has ever seen that happen and I literally turn everyone's dreams to reality. So now since I know that I know that I can do it and it works, I'm like, okay, I'm going to open every day, I'm going to start, you know, selling more things so I can start getting people to make donations to get these three t-shirts so I can start building this program.

So I've been going through the loops and I've changed my program name multiple times but I'm right now like trying to design the entire platform of what everything should look like. And the purpose of it hands down is to get all of my all of the kids and all of the young adults out of the hood and okay I'm I'm gonna start with Oakland, right? Because that's where I'm from. And I feel like that if I can get everybody inside of my program where I teach them not only how to code but how to design, you know, print and design their own apparel while also creating a profitable business, you know, learning how to build generational wealth, learning about stocks, learning about credit.

Like that's the program that I'm designing right now for the Bay Area. So I hope about at least a year from now, my program is up and running an East Oakland and I can invite everybody out to Oakland so y'all can see what I've been doing. That's so exciting. That's awesome. We've had some people obviously chime in. I wanna give, I wanna give some shout outs to, obviously someone goes to San Francisco and I miss the mission style burrito. We got to have the burrito, burritos, nothing like that. No, I know. James, JC my guys, good to see you Jeff, Marcia, Alex, saying loves the poster, obviously motivational board.

It's great to see you all Morgan. It's great to see you. Shonday, what's going on? Girl, such an amazing story, Sydney. So many different paths and success. Absolutely. And also, Shonday, it's great to see you also. Hey, hey, girl, it's good to see you. I love it. So many comments coming in. All right, so let's pivot real quick. actually know. Talk about why do you think it's so important to build community, right? It's something you're passionate about, something I'm passionate about. Why do you think that's the unlock? Not only for the person building it, but for others as well. Mainly because there's this poem by my angel, titled Nobody Can Do It Alone.

And it just sticks to me so much because I remember, like I said, when I was at 16 and when I was homeless and I was trying to figure out how to get here, I had so many people that wasn't family, right? These are people that either I met at school, these are people that I met while I was in the shelter, these are people that I met while I was cleaning their house. I built this community with all of these folks that were there to be able to not only have my back but give me advice, not like, you know, biased advice but more so career advice because I was 16 and 17 going into these engineers' houses that were already like in their young 20s, 23, 24 and 25 and I'm like, okay, there are only a few years older than me.

If they can do this, I can do this. So I was like, like, okay, you know, effort. I don't care. I'm not going to try to bring my family, you know, behind me, I'm going to continue with the folks that want to be around me right now. And this part of my life and this growth and community, it matters so much. And the community that I started building every since I started to break in the tech is my young and ambitious squad that I formed on career karma back in 2019. And if any of you guys are going to be out of their ATL this summer will be there with our squad t-shirts.

That's an energy. I get to make squad t-shirts. Everybody can be drugged out. But yeah, the community matters and it's like you go through things whether they're personal in your career. Like right now I have a lot of folks in my mind they squad who's been laid off. They can go to their families and try to get sympathy or get folks to care. But a lot of these folks don't even know what we're doing. Like They don't even know what engineers do. Like they don't even know what day looks like. So if you don't build a community of people that speak your language and understand where you come from, they understand your struggle and they understand where you wanna go, it's nine times out of 10 that you won't be successful.

You build that community though with all of these like-minded people and everybody can bounce ideas off of each other when you're feeling down, somebody else can have your back, when they're feeling down, you can have their back. That's just a circle, that's a circle of money right there. And I value everybody to, especially now in 2023 with all these layoffs going on, we need community. We need folks that, you know, that've been in tech for a long time to wanna create community. And they can tell folks how to be strong during a time like this, cause it's tough. And without your sister's, I don't know how you gonna make it cause I don't know how I would have.

I mean, we as human beings are not meant to live lifelong. And I think you said it best. I think having people like minded individuals around you to support you to lift you up, I think it's the unlock. I really, really do think so. So talk to me about, so I know you talked about your software journey a little bit, but can you kind of approach it more, or more from words of encouragement to others, right? Because again, I mean, I think your story's just so incredible and I'm sure a lot of people want to give up. I'm sure there's a lot of people who don't want to take the jump in the software or maybe there's some people who need to get off their butts and do it.

So I'm curious if you can share just a little bit more about your story, getting in the software development and definitely more from like an encouraging getting people off the mat. Definitely. So let's go back. I guess we could go back about seven years ago. I thought you about say 70 years ago. I said, girl, we got to end this about 70 years ago. So yeah, about seven years ago, like I mentioned to you guys, I was, I had just dropped out of high school and we're just trying to figure out what I wanted to do in my life. I ended up enrolling into Barbara College.

I'm so excited. And here's the kit. This is, this is one for the ice and I'm Kate. The day after I graduated, I am enrolled in Barbara College and about a month and a half later, the entire school closed. So you tell me if that wasn't the universe trying to send me a sign, like sitting like you got more work to do, you have to figure it out, like how you're going to give back to the community and you're going to, you have to figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life. You try to play me. You try to just go to a barber school and think that it was easy because it was right there instead of really sitting there and putting in the work to figure out what you wanted to do.

I'm thinking back to my senior year about the coding program. My teachers were awesome. They put, before I dropped out of school, they created a whole entire coding program for me because they're like, this little girl won't come to school. She's great at math. Like she can do numbers in her head and never come to school. Like she's coming to school and, you know, ace and all the algebra tests, ace and all the generalities. I was a kid that had to be at school to even get a B. So, let's see what we not to say. So because of that, my teachers built that coding program and not just that right before I left that school.

And one of my teachers, she was a black queer teacher and she booked me a flight to Harvard and MIT. And she was like, I don't care what you're saying, what you say, we're not asking your mom. We're going to just give your mom the papers show her that we have the tickets and we're going and I want to take you to Harvard and MIT so you can sit in their engineering classes. And so you can see what it's like to actually do this shit. I'm nervous like I have never been out of Oakland my entire life like what is this lady trying to do with me?

What's her agenda right? So now we're at Harvard we go to MIT I sat in I think first I set in Harvard's engineering class. And there was just all of these people with all these Mac books, all of this shit, the one across the street. There's a vibe for sure. I can imagine. I'm like, what the hell is happening and who is going on? And that right there changed my life. So even though I live and I graduated and went to the barber school, something in me was like, you want to code, you want to code, you want to get there, like you got to get to it.

So now the Barbara College is closed. Now I'm in San Francisco running around like a chicken with my head cut off. And then I found a coding boot camp. The difference was though about seven years ago, there were no ISAs, like which is the income shared remakes. You had to take out a loan for these boot camps or pay out of pocket. And I had no credit. So of course they gave me the loan immediately. I didn't know what the hell I was signing up for. It was like in like three weeks, there were asking me to pay like $700. I don't have $700 for you guys.

So that changed. So now I'm like, okay, the Barbara College, the first coding boot camp, that didn't work. Well, now I'm like, okay, I'm still homeless. I need somewhere to sleep. So I ended up finding in my first apartment. I moved to Stockton, California. I found the community college there and they had a computer science program. So I enrolled in there. That was, it was super easy for me. I'm like, there's no way that I'm getting through these Java classes and Python classes and C++ classes were no struggle. Like, where's the project? Like, how am I gonna get a job? What is going on? My friend ended up scrolling on Instagram one day and found Career Karma.

And she was like, you can go to Career Karma, you can get into a boot camp that'll help you. And literally my life took off every six. So that was like 18 to 21, working so many labor jobs, trying to figure it out. And I found career karma when I was 21. So now four years, four years. And since I found career karma, I came and I created our YNA squad. We all started doing boot camps together. And then we graduated. We went through the struggle of the job search together, and now we're here. So it's a lot. And it's been a long time coming, but I wanna just tell everybody that sitting at their desk right now or sitting even if you're in your bed right now early, close your eyes and just think about your life 10 years from now.

Think about who you wanna be, think about who you wanna show up as, think about how you want people to look at you and how do you want your story to be told. Think about those things. And then once you think about those things, think about what you can see yourself doing without getting paid much money, right? Of course as engineers, we get played very well by those things that just because they come into engineering all their problems want to go away. It doesn't work well. Right. Plan before that check hits and you don't really like engineering, you don't like coding, then you're wasting your time.

You're taking a job where you can come out of your house. So you really have to take the time, figure out what you wanna do, and you're about like getting to figure in a gym and you're here. Yeah, I love that. I love that. As we wrap up here, is there anything else, any words of encouragement? I have two more questions for you, but kind of the last thing, do you have any more words of encouragement? Anything else on your heart that you want to share as we wrap up here? I just want to tell folks to go hard. I'm here for you, YNA is here for you.

If any of you have been laid off and you want some folks to come, chat with, you want to get involved with open source, you need help with your resume, you're going through a boot camp and you're feeling like giving up because you're like, once you graduate, how are you going to find a job with everybody being laid off? come message me. I might not message you back right away. But you try. Exactly. I really try. I'm not one of those people that see all of these LinkedIn messages and Twitter messages and even Instagram. I'm on Instagram too and just ignore them. Oh, I need to follow you last term.

Yeah. Like I tried my best to reach out to folks and give back to the community. So reach out to me, use my resources, use my squads resources, because we got real results. You know what I mean? We got real results. At one point, I was looking at 15 of my members that started with me in 2019. And we all have jobs. We all making that bag. And it just feels so good when we can meet in person. I think Render last year was our first year where I was able to bring the whole squad together. I got a big Airbnb. So. All the events was planned out.

It was like 20 of us riding through Atlanta and we was deep, but it was, it was lit. So this year we're hoping to have like 30, even 40, we possibly might get 40 of us outside. If you want to come chill with the game, tap in with me. Um, and let's get you in. I'll be there. I'll be there. Um, all right. So last few questions. First one, what tech are you interested in working on or think people should be looking at right now? So right now, what my job has us all focused on right now is the cloud. And they like sent out emails right before the new year telling us that this year between, I think, about the end of quarter three, they want the majority of their software engineers to be cloud certified.

So that means, you know, AWS certificates, also Google has a few different certificates that we're working on. But yeah, I would prioritize cloud engineering right now. Also data science and Python, because AI right now is taking over. So yeah, between those two areas between the cloud and data, I think those things are so important. I agree. I agree. All right, last question. And honestly, to be honest with you, this whole entire episode has been this question, but I still want to get a little bit more out of you because you're just such so much wisdom. So this show is called Guine's Council 2.0 because we had Guine's Councilors in Middle School High School and college, but as adults, not so much anymore.

What would be your biggest piece of career advice for your younger self or to anybody. My younger self, I would tell me to relax and not relax and not think that you have to know everything. Like don't think that you have to have your life figured out right now. I'm a nerd, I'm a weirdo, you know? You don't know too many young people like me who knew what they wanted to do when they were in high school, 17 and 18. So they didn't, they weren't out partying and living like a young person. Like I feel like I missed all of that. And it's like now that I'm 25 and I've been on computers for the last like four, five years being a fucking nerd.

Like I feel like I missed out on being young. You know, I don't know what it feels like to be young. Like sometimes I go out and my friends are asking me like, how old are you? And sometimes I be having to look at my ID. like I don't even know, I really don't know. Like when my birthday just hit and I turned 25 and everybody was asking me, and I was so close to saying 30 this, 30 that, and I'm like, oh man, you've really only 25. Like life shouldn't be this serious. You know, life shouldn't, it should be okay to make mistakes. It should pay to not have everything together.

But for me, mine's a little different because I don't have family members who can hold me down, you know, when I don't have it, right? Like if I don't pay my rent, I'm home. If I don't go to work, I don't eat. Like, so my situation is a little different, but everybody's situation is not the same. And I think the young people in this new generation, they see everybody, social media is taking over. So you have young people that get on social media and they're like, okay, these people have these cars, they have these chains, they got all this stuff there. And I want designer, I want this, I want this, but really a lot of these people that walk around with all this designer on a lot of them still broke, still living with their mama.

So how can we compare our life to these people? Like this is this is real theme, you know? So I would just tell the young people to be patient, love life, go out on those dates, go to those parties, you know? don't say that I don't want to hang out because I have a finals to do your finals but go out and have some fun because life is short. Yeah it's so funny I could talk with you for hours but yeah it's same I feel that way too in college I was very like school school because again I had to be the student to show up at every class so I can at least get a B right so you know didn't go out quite as much and it's one of the things I regret one of the things I regret so I love Well, Sydney, thank you.

You're amazing. For those of you again, please go follow Sydney on Twitter or on LinkedIn. And Sydney, hopefully I'll see you soon. Thank you. I'm ready to invite you back in the time we could talk. I love it. I love it. All right, y'all. Well, you guys have a wonderful, wonderful first year of Friday. We'll see y'all next week. And y'all have a good one. Sydney, stay on real quick so I can say bye to you. But y'all have a good one. We'll see y'all next week. Hey, you did it. You listen to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why?

There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like right now, unless you're driving, and don't do it. So thank you again if you need to reach out to me taylor at vaco.com or at tdastin on all social media handles and I hope you have a fantastic day.